The only way to measure the sun's past activity is to look for evidence of spiking flares in preserved tree trunks and ancient glacial ice. However, these sources haven't allowed researchers to get a real idea of whether the sun releases superflares and, if so, how often.

"Stars that are similar to our sun generate superflares once per century, which is 30 to 60 times more frequent than previously thought," Valeriy Vasilyev, a stellar activity researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, told Mashable.

The Sun is a giant glowing ball of plasma that keeps our solar system together, but there are billions of stars like it spread out across the cosmos. Although scientists have only

New findings suggest that an extraordinarily powerful and dangerous burst of radiation might flare from our sun in the future.